Chase has quietly changed the maths for anyone sitting on a pile of Ultimate Rewards points. Its Points Boost feature, rolled out in 2025, lets you redeem points through Chase Travel for select flights and hotels at well above the standard 1 cent per point — sometimes close to 2 cents, which is roughly what The Points Guy values Chase points at anyway.
The value you get depends on your card. Sapphire Reserve and Sapphire Reserve for Business cardholders can hit up to 2 cents per point on both hotels and flights with select airlines. The cheaper Sapphire Preferred and Ink Business Preferred typically top out lower — around 1.5 cents on hotels and up to 1.75 cents on airfare. Chase has since extended the perk to its no-annual-fee Freedom cards too, though those only earn rotating hotel offers worth up to about 1.1 cents per point, with no flight boosts.
Finding a boost is simple enough: search flights or hotels in Chase Travel, tick the "Points Boost only" filter, or look for the small rocket icon next to a points price. Curated properties in Chase's The Edit collection are the most reliable source of boosted hotel redemptions, but deals also appear at plenty of budget-friendly properties.
Where it gets genuinely clever is stacking. Sapphire Reserve holders get up to $250 a year in statement credits for The Edit stays (two-night minimum). Book a boosted rate, apply the credit, then pay the remainder with points — one example cited was a two-night stay near Disneyland that worked out to under 19,000 Chase points per night, versus 108,000 Marriott Bonvoy points for the same rooms. The Sapphire Preferred's $100 annual hotel credit stacks the same way.
Flights are more hit-and-miss. You'll rarely find boosts on ordinary domestic economy fares, but long-haul premium cabins occasionally beat transferring points to an airline partner — especially when award space is scarce. The sensible routine: compare the Points Boost price, the transfer-partner award price and the cash fare before committing. A bonus of booking through Chase Travel is that airlines often treat it as a paid fare, so you can still earn miles and status credit.
A few practical notes. The pricier card doesn't always win — the Sapphire Preferred has sometimes shown better boost rates than the Reserve, and you can move points between cards to book through whichever offers the best rate. Chase has also started price-matching some hotel rates to prices found outside Chase Travel. And if you're a long-time cardholder grandfathered into the old fixed redemption rates of 1.25 or 1.5 cents per point, you can still redeem at those values until 26 October 2027.
For travellers who can't be bothered learning the transfer-partner game, this is the easiest way to stretch Chase points meaningfully — provided you always sanity-check the rate per point before hitting book. Two-cent redemptions are harder to find than at launch, but hotel boosts paired with statement credits remain the sweet spot.
